A further simplification of methods resulted in promptness in discharging commissioned officers. The disbursing officer at a demobilization camp saw all officers in three classes—those who in service had been accountable for neither government property nor money; those who had been accountable for property only; and those who had been in possession of government funds. The officers of Class 1 could be paid off finally at discharge; but the accounts of accountable officers were subject to audit, and their final pay was withheld until these audits were made. Inasmuch as officers often came up for discharge with two or three months’ back pay due them, the withholding of such considerable amounts of money for an extended period imposed a hardship upon them. Under the old system it would have been a long time before all of the discharged officers could have received their final pay. In fact, after the termination of every previous war in which American emergency troops had ever engaged it was a long time before the Government finally settled the pay claims of the accountable officers. The accumulation of officers’ accounts in the spring of 1919 became so great as to make it evident that under the existing plan the War Department would be a dozen years at least in auditing all of them; which meant—if the old audit system were to be continued—that it would be 1931 before some of the World War officers received their final pay for their services.
The Director of Finance determined to do better than that. To be sure, the audit of the property accounts was required by law; but instead of continuing the system of auditing them in Washington, the Director of Finance arranged for a force of field auditors to go to the demobilization centers and audit the property accounts as they were presented. The result was that the officers responsible for property were enabled to draw their final pay with their discharge certificates.
Officers responsible for government money occupied a different status, but such officers were relatively few in number. The former plan in use required the audit of their accounts by the Treasury Department, and it was evident that the Treasury Department would be a year or more in making these audits. Meanwhile none of the discharged officers would be able to draw their final pay. This auditing arrangement was a requirement, not of law, but of military regulation, which the Director of Finance was able to sweep aside, paying off such officers finally upon the receipt of statements from them accounting in detail for the money which they had handled. The Government risked nothing by this innovation, because officers accountable for money were required to give bond to indemnify the Government against losses. On the other hand the change made it possible for discharged accountable officers to receive their final pay within a month after discharge.
On February 24, 1919, the President signed a bill granting a cash bonus of sixty dollars to every soldier who had been in uniform before November 11, 1918. The payment of the bonus to soldiers still to be discharged after the bonus law was in effect offered no difficulty at all, since the camp disbursing officers needed only to add the bonus to the final pay of each man coming up for discharge. But on February 24 approximately 1,600,000 troops had already been discharged. The payment of the bonus to these men added measurably to the burden of work upon the Finance Service.
The Director of Finance announced that he would begin paying the bonus on March 1. The Zone Finance Officer at Washington was designated as the official to pay the bonus to officers and enlisted men who had already been discharged. He hastily organized an office with about sixty new and inexperienced clerks. Meanwhile the newspapers, the Red Cross, the American Legion, and all other organizations concerned with the welfare of discharged soldiers spread the tidings of the bonus payment and urged all discharged men to present their claims for it at once. It is doubtful if ever before a national publicity campaign reached its mark with such thoroughness in such a brief period of time. Claims for the bonus snowed upon Washington at the rate of 100,000 a day, and within two weeks practically all of the discharged 1,600,000 had filed their claims. The pay office grew until it numbered more than a thousand clerks. With this force it cleaned up the whole job in two months’ time.
Never before had government checks been issued at such a rapid rate. It was necessary to make use of the most modern labor-saving appliances in accomplishing this record of payment. The Bureau of Engraving, which prints the paper money for the Government, engraved a special check with the sixty-dollar amount printed in, so that it was necessary for the clerical force only to date the checks, fill in the names of payees, and then sign the instruments. The Zone Finance Officer himself was the only person in his department authorized to sign checks on the Treasury. However, upon his request the Treasury Department authorized five clerks whom he designated to sign his name for him. The Treasury further authorized the use of the pantograph or multiple signing device, which enabled each designated clerk to sign five checks with one writing of the signature. On the name line of each check was typed in the payee’s name, his address, and his army serial number. The Zone Finance Officer adopted a window envelope through which could be seen the recipient’s name and address as written on the check inside, and this measure saved the great labor of addressing the envelopes. All checks were typed in triplicate—one original and two carbon copies. Both copies were filed away to be the Government’s record of the transaction. The cases in which the duplicates were filed filled a large room.
Soldiers of the surname of Smith received 15,200 of these bonus checks, and these were only the Smiths among the 1,600,000 troops discharged before March 1, 1919. If the same percentage carried through the rest of the Army, it is evident that there were enough Smiths in uniform to make up an entire combat division with a sufficient residue over to provide the necessary accompaniment of supply troops. If pushed to it, the Smith family could fight a respectable war on its own account. But the balance of power is maintained by the Brown army. The Brown family collected 9,000 of the 1,600,000 bonus checks issued from Washington in the spring of 1919.
Although every effort was made to pay off all troops in full at the time of their discharge, there were many men who, through their own fault or the fault of those in command of them, or else because of conditions over which there was no control, failed to receive all of the money rightfully theirs when they left the military service. For such men the remedy was the claim. A financial claim against the Government is notoriously a static thing. At the present day there are Civil War claims still outstanding and unsettled. The Director of Finance determined that the World War should leave behind it no great body of soldier claimants to haunt Washington and nurse their grievances for years to come. Under the ordinary procedure the claims of soldiers for arrears of pay had to go through the channels of both the War Department and the Treasury Department before final payments could be made. The Director of Finance sought and, on January 30, 1919, received a decision of the Comptroller of the Treasury which permitted the former to settle back-pay claims without reference to the Treasury Department when there was no construction of law involved and the rights of the claimants were evident.
Although the claimants numbered many thousands, the number was relatively small compared to the total number of men in uniform. At the end of the calendar year 1919, less than 5 per cent of the nearly 4,000,000 men who were under arms on the first day of the armistice had filed claims with the War Department. Three-fourths of the claims were for the refund of allotments deducted from pay but for one reason or another never paid by the Government to the allottees; so that only a little more than 1 per cent of the Army left the service with claims resulting from errors in soldiers’ pay accounts. Because of the more intricate financial relations between officers and the War Department, the claims of officers were greater in proportion, but the officers’ claims submitted up to the end of the year 1919 amounted in number to only 10 per cent of the total number of officers commissioned.
The failure of the Government in many instances to pay over allotments to soldiers’ dependents arose from a multiplicity of causes. In the first place, the legal method of paying allotments changed in the midst of the active part of the war. The War Risk Insurance Bureau for many months paid to soldiers’ dependents the allotments granted by the soldiers, plus the amount which the Government added to each allotment. In June, 1918, Congress enacted a law requiring that all allotments of this form be paid directly by the War Department, leaving the War Risk Insurance Bureau to pay only those allotments which did not carry government allowances with them. The troops were at once apprised of this change; but because of the failure of individuals to discontinue their deductions to the War Risk Insurance Bureau, or because officers, busy with other things, neglected to do it for men under their command, or because of the loss of papers in the mails, thousands of pay deductions continued to go in to the Bureau of War Risk Insurance long after that bureau had discontinued paying the allotments to dependents. Out of this situation arose thousands of claims from discharged soldiers.